Looming postal cutback worries secretary of state

Tuesday

May 29, 2012 at 12:01 AMJun 4, 2012 at 3:47 PM

STOCKTON - The state's top elections official took a tour of the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voter's Office on Friday as workers checked signatures of absentee voters, stacked up completed ballots for later counting and kept the office humming in the lead-up to the primary election next Tuesday.

Zachary K. Johnson

STOCKTON - The state's top elections official took a tour of the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voter's Office on Friday as workers checked signatures of absentee voters, stacked up completed ballots for later counting and kept the office humming in the lead-up to the primary election next Tuesday.

It's the first statewide election under the new top-two primary rules, but Secretary of State Debra Bowen said she wasn't expecting that shift or anything else to create any big issues with the mechanics of the election.

But there's a problem looming in November that should be of particular concern to San Joaquin County voters, she said: A mail-processing center in south Stockton is on the U.S. Postal Service's list of facilities it will start closing this summer. It's still unclear which California centers on the list would close before the November election, according to Bowen's office.

But a closure of the processing centers would delay delivery time of elections materials going out and ballots coming back in and ultimately result in uncounted votes on ballots received after the legal deadline, she said.

Legislation is pending in Washington that could keep the centers from closing before the November election. "California has much more at stake, because we are much larger and have so many people who vote by mail," she said.

It was her first visit to the San Joaquin County election headquarters since it relocated to the County Administration Building.

Putting on an election across the country is an enormous task, Bowen said. "There really isn't anything else we do in this country that involves so many people and is so accurate."

She's been visiting other elections offices in the state in the weeks leading up to the primary.

In San Joaquin County, she learned that the Registrar of Voter's Office has been getting a spike in calls from people who said they had heard that mailed-in ballots are counted last or only in close races.

Not true, Bowen said, but rumors like that do turn up around election time, she said.

"These rumors are like cockroaches," Bowen said. "We squish them wherever we see them."